After reading an article on Tumblr’s architecture, I was intrigued by their affinity for Redis. I know lots of other projects use it, so I did some reading to find out if it was a suitable replacement for Memcached (it is marketed as “Memcached on Steroids”).

Redis is not an LRU Cache out of the box, it requires configuration for that. Redis is a NoSQL solution that provides a replication solution and can store key-values with expiration similar to Memcached.

A little about Membase:

Membase was developed by several leaders of the memcached project, who had founded a company, NorthScale, expressly to meet the need for an key-value database that enjoyed all the simplicity, speed, and scalability of memcached, but also provided the storage, persistence and querying capabilities of a database.

A then Membase became Couchbase:

As of February 8, 2011, the Membase project founders and Membase, Inc. announced a merger with CouchOne (a company with many of the principal players behind CouchDB) with an associated project merger. The merged project will be known as Couchbase. In January of 2012, Couchbase released a product building on Membase, known as Couchbase Server 1.8.

Most of the benchmarks I saw comparing Memcached and Redis: Memcached is still way faster yet “lacks the featureset of Redis.” Most of the benchmarks I saw for Couchbase used phrases like “sub-millisecond responses” / “twice as fast as Memcached.” I understand it’s cool to use sets and append / prepend to them in Redis, but other than those features, what makes it ultimately the better choice? I have concluded it just isn’t. If you like the tools it provides, awesome! If you want something that’s fast, has great tools, and is powerful all day long – why aren’t we all using Couchbase?